I wonder how many people today remember Project Ginger? It was 2001 and somebody had invented something very important, but almost nobody knew what. “If enough people see the machine you won’t have to convince them to architect cities around it. It’ll just happen,” said Steve Jobs of Apple, an early backer. “IT’S GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD BUT WHAT IS IT?” ran a typical headline. Theories abounded, each more optimistic than the last. Cold fusion? Teleportation? A computer printer that actually worked?
After months of hype, this new humanity-saving invention turned out only to be the Segway, a sort of stand-up balance scooter that it was apparently impossible to fall off. Then George W Bush famously fell off one. Having failed to change the
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